Spam trademark

One of my favorite news site, The Register, is carrying a story about Hormel and their trademark "Spam." We all know and love spam, that meat product comprised mostly of "pork shoulder meat with ham meat added." My high school used to make "spam & cheese," and it wasn't that bad.

Well things were going well for Hormel and their spam trademark, until unsolicited postings started on the Internet. Originally spam described postings to Usenet newsgroups, and were generally off-topic. Once people started getting lists of email addresses, the joy we know as "unsolicited email" or "unsolicited bulk email" became a problem. Basically any unwanted email or web traffic is known no as spam.

Which brings us to our friends Hormel. They've decided to support their mark in the UK. Once you obtain a trademark, you need to protect your rights. You need to defend against infringers, and also need to defend against dilution of your mark. Trademark dilution occurs to famous marks when they begin to obtain a generic meaning. If the trademark holder does nothing to protect against this, then it is possible they can lose their trademark. A very common method of protecting against dilution is to advertise your mark. I recall seeing ads for Xerox, reminding people of two things. First, you make photocopies, and not Xeroxes, of documents. Second, Xerox has more than one "r": the registered trademark ® symbol. Other companies that protect their marks in this method are Kleenex (as opposed to facial tissue) and Coca-Cola (in some areas "a coke" means "a soda").

It seems kind of strange that Hormel is protecting against unsolicited email. Dilution generally occurs when people use a trademark to distinguish something similar- such as using Xerox instead of photocopy, or "google" instead of "Internet search." I don't think people use "spam" to refer to a meat product, instead it's something completely different- a computer related item. It could also be that Hormel is just looking for a nice way to increase sales in the UK by drawing attention to their product in a different manner. It has been a long time since Monty Python did their spam skit...